Do you know your family stories?

I caught the Aziz Ansari comedy Master of None recently and the second episode had a great, and simple, premise: Do you know your parents' stories?

In this episode, the show is at pains to point out how different the privileged upbringing of character Brian, a first generation immigrant from a Taiwanese background, was from that of his parents who came from a poor farming background – so poor his dad had to eat his pet chicken.

At one point, Brian says of his parents' lives: "I know the big points", before he, and Ansari's character, Dev, decide it is crazy they know so little about their folks' tales of settling in America.

Watching Master of None I realised I only really know my parents' highlights reel, too. Like Brian's dad, my Chinese stepfather was raised poor on a farm, his was in East Malaysia where, he proudly recounts, he "never wore pants until he had to go to school". His "big points" are: he came to Australia to attend university, met my mother and then, being adopted by him soon after, I was around for a lot of the big points after that! But he rose up the ranks to become CEO of a telecoms company in Singapore.

Advertisement

But what of his early life? I have a faded photo of him singing in a band. What music did he play? What were his plans for the band? Did he have to consume any household pets?

Mum's first "big point" was having me at the ripe old age of 16 but I know precious little about her time before that.

Growing up, our parents are the people we spend the most time with, hours and years of hanging out together but so little of it is spent learning about what makes them tick? So much is taken for granted.

But telling our stories can be good for all of us. Not only can it bring you closer to your parents but it can help kids become better adjusted. Hearing family stories can boost self esteem and empathy, it can be every bit as good for children as sitting down to read a nightly storybook.

All families have a story to tell. My grandmother kept silent for over 40 years about the fact she had fallen pregnant to a soldier who never returned from the second world war. She had been forced to hide her pregnancy and give away the baby once it was born. Had her son not knocked on her door one day, we would probably never have found out.

So, how do we find out more about the people who raised us? In Master of None, Dev and Brian hold a very awkward family dinner and grill their initially reluctant parents about the things that happened before they had kids. A friend once asked me if I would write up their mother's life story as I would a celeb profile. A lack of time meant that never happened but it is a great idea. Why not sit down with our parents and conduct a straight-up interview, get beyond the big points and find out things that may be forgotten in time?

I know my grandfather's "big points" but his dementia means there will be no more filling in the blanks. The blanks are taking over now, the stories lost.

My wife became aware of how little she knew about her parents when she had kids of her own. Since then she has consciously probed them about parenting, about their life and it has brought them closer together. What is friendship if not the swapping of tales, the sharing of experiences? We are so quick to do this with friends, online, or with potential new mates but we too often ignore the stories that made us, the stories that form part of our story.

On Master of None, Ansari's real parents play his TV family and just this week he blogged about how the Parents episode had brought them closer together.

"I haven't always had the best, most open relationship with my parents because we are weirdly closed off emotionally sometimes," Ansari wrote. "But we are getting better. And if you have something like that with your family – I urge you to work at it and get better because these are special people in your life."

Sounds like a lot of families I know, and nothing that a nice awkward dinner can't fix.